Bucks Fizz perform 'Making Your Mind Up' on Eurovision 1981 Eurovision icon Jay Aston has opened up about her cancer journey, admitting she never once thought about retiring during treatment. The star, who won the song contest with Bucks Fizz in 1981, was diagnosed with tongue cancer in 2018. Speaking exclusively to Express.
co.uk, she opened up about her determination to get back in the studio and on stage during the treatment. Jay had a seven-hour operation to remove 40% of her tongue and surgeons created a new tongue using tissue from her thigh, which they fed through her neck.
"I was determined to get back," she said. "There was a song we were recording when we were doing our third album with Mike Stock (of Stock, Aitken and Waterman fame), and it was called From Here To Eternity. The lyric was very sort of [emotional] because when I had the diagnosis, my daughter was only 15 and she was just doing her mock GCSEs and when I was having the surgery I had a demo of the song and I'd just play it on my phone in the ward.
"I was like, 'I'm gonna go back and finish that song.' Because I got the phone call from the hospital the day I was starting to do the song to say, 'We need you to come in,' which meant, 'Yes, it's positive - you've got cancer, basically.' "So it was it was emotional singing that song and I was in the hospital and going, 'I'm gonna go back and finish that song.
' I sometimes [still] find it quite hard to sing that song. Six months later, I went back and finished.
